Portals - An Introduction

Portals - An Introduction

Portals - An Introduction

What are Portals?
Portals, are designed to give customers access to part of the CRM. By creating portals, you can extend access to your CRM account to your customers. Through a portal, your customers can access the modules and some of the associated data such as products, invoices, and notes. They can also view, edit, or create records or add notes and attachments.

Understanding Business Scenarios
Let us consider a few scenarios that will help you understand how portals can help your business.
  • In a franchise - Imagine you run a fast food business and have granted others the right to operate the franchise in a few locations. You use the CRM to manage all the business details and to track outlets' performance. The franchise owners can request to view their outlets' performance and their customers' details. You can create exclusive portals for the franchise owners. They will be able to view and edit the relevant records right from the CRM.
  • In the automobile industry - For example, you have an automobile shop and want to track your customers' details, your sold vehicles and servicing schedules. To do this, you can create a portal and share it with your clients. The customers can view and edit their details in the portal, and they will be updated in your CRM records. Similarly, if they want to get their vehicle serviced, they can fill in their details using the portal.
  • In an educational institute - If you run a school, instead of manually entering every student's details, you can provide parents with access to the portal's. They can add, update, or view their child's details in the portal and share the students' grades and performance scores with the parents through the portal.
  • For business partners - You run a software company and use CRM to follow up with your contacts and leads or to track multiple deals that are at different stages. There is a meeting with the partners and you want to discuss all the contacts and the deals that have the highest revenue. Imagine how tedious it would be to share this complex information with individual partners. You can easily manage this situation by creating a portal for the partners, where you give them access to the Contacts module and add a contact lookup in the Deals module in CRM. This will enable them to view the contacts and their associated deals and add or remove details in the modules based on their permissions.
Availability

Permission Required

Users with the Manage Portal Profile permission can create a portal and invite customers.

Note
  1. You can configure up to five portal user types. The first user type is free and can be created only for the Contacts module. 
  2. Four more portal user types can be created by purchasing the required number of user licenses. These additional portals can be created for Leads, Contacts and Custom modules. 
  3. First portal - You can add the first user type and invite up to 10,000 users to the portal for free. Please contact us if you need to add more users.
  4. Four other portals - For these portals, you need to purchase user licenses to add users to the portals. The licenses purchased can be distributed among the additional portals that you create. The pricing model for additional purchases:
  1. 50 users (minimum user count) - $600/month
  2. 51 to 100 users - $12/user/month
  3. 100 users up  - $10/user/month


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